


Snapping The Royal Sceptre

by Honey_Rae_Pluto



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Character Death, Depression, Meta Poetry, Poetry, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Self-Harm, Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 16:00:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29968818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Honey_Rae_Pluto/pseuds/Honey_Rae_Pluto
Summary: Beat poetry written down, one poem for one death until they all fall.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 9





	1. Freddie

**Author's Note:**

> Read it out loud, it makes sense then.

Freddie was a god in his own world, his hollow world with hollow love and hollow words.

He felt the metal against his side, biting his lip as he pulled the sculpting blade across his rib.

It wasn't cold careless metal with a stinging embrace, nothing like how it was written in books, nowhere near as romantic or picturesque like cutting through lace: there was no cloaked skeleton reaching out a bony hand from beneath a dark rich robe for him to grab, no pull to the other side just a shove from within forcing a stab... At least he'd use a thing of beauty; a knife, one that had created art to do this with; his final masterpiece, wrought by his own hand, same fingers that on ivories crafted such life.

There was just him alone in the boarding school dormitory, his stuff lying dishevelled from where he'd thrown it himself - no one could destroy him, accuse him, if he silenced himself unextraordinarily. 

He was alone in the world - stage open for the protagonist's massacre, looking in a mirror of his life as he played both hero and antagonist in his own metatheatre, crying until his eyes were puffy and red, until his nose ran and his hand reached for the blade again. This was it. He would be...

He'd wondered what would happen, if his parents would care, if he had friends that would bear it.... He didn't. His mum might, but she didn't have the emotional intelligence to show it, never holding him even when he asked to know it. And he'd asked for time in memoriam. Oh, hundreds if not thousands of times, 'mama… can I've a hug?', but cold glances turn to gentle anger - slowly it became easier to stay away and not linger, easier to live in the school without them and be not condemned.

When he did come back Freddie always wished he hadn't. She'd be too sweet for the first week, offering too much and telling him how he was her little boy, her pride and joy. Until she'd get bored, until something else became more interesting. Then he'd be background noise, something that detracted from her perfect niche. Then he'd make the same mistakes for the sake of making them, in the vain attempt to earn a different result from the same stem. He'd ask for her love all meek, a mother's love he'd seen others so freely receive, be so easily given. And she'd say he was stupid. Too delicate. Too weak.

She'd say he had never wanted her love, that he rebelled at the first sight of it. That it was his fault for not being a good enough son. She'd cry, cry like when his father hit her, cry as if she'd been struck by his words, words like a whip he'd felt on his own skin. Now, he watched the very top layer of his skin split by the cut, the fresh cherry red blood slowly appearing, thin, root like arms going into the area around the pores, no - she wouldn't care. She'd mourn the day he became guilty as sin.

And of his father? What pride he may have left would soon disappear, taken away like rot on the teeth. He wouldn't want a faggot son, even if he hid it, if he married whoever was best suited and had children like he'd always wanted, he'd still be a fag underneath.

A poof, just a fairy. Ones his father would turn his nose up at.

Freddie closed his eyes for a second, letting his mind see the world as a child again, a child looking up as the hand came down, a child who was told that they were too different. A child whose father had long since stopped looking at him with all but a frown.

So that was two people checked off of Freddie's list, not enough cared to be missed. There were always people in his dorm, people that didn't like him, people that heckled 'bucky' at him, stabbed his back with insulting his face. What did it matter where he was? In Zanzibar he was too Indian, in India too British. If he went to Britain he'd be just another coloured that would steal a job. He'd never find a place.

A third line, this one harder against the flesh of his middle, from left to right, already blood welled into his fingernails with the dirt. The blood poured out more obviously from that line, a large drop following the fall of the cut down it's few inch length and traveling further, becoming a blotch on his white school shirt. There were other ways to do it, he'd considered using his belt and the half empty bar in the wardrobe, dying in the closet - at least his father would be proud then. But part of him still wanted that storybook escape that came with a 'pause it's. That true love he'd dreamed up was to come through and yank the knife away; to tell him he was too precious and needed by the world to do such a thing to himself and he simply had to live another day.

But he knew he was alone, and he'd be alone until he died.

The fourth line was on the palm of his hand, like the symbolic plays he'd seen where the dagger is grasped to draw a blood band; a line for his imaginary hero, the man that would never save him.

Had there ever been a reason not to? Had he ever been significant enough to live? Freddie jabbed the knife into his wrist, hand clenched in pain, he'd expected to feel release with this. Oh to feel enlightened before the end; but all he felt was anguish. He felt it boil in his blood that ran down his skin, he felt the anguish that made his chest constrict and body ache and wear thin. He was fake, trying to be something he wasn't, he was never going to work as something that would honour the money spent on the school he was sent, he'd never settle in an honest marriage, never fit in as anything other than a spectacle hellbent.

That was the thing, Freddie grimaced as he twisted the blade in a single sharp motion, he'd only ever be something to look at, the other, composer or commotion. He let out a dry sob, they'd find his body wordless, and talk it over their dinner alewife. They'd find him cold and lifeless, and he'd just be a story, a punchline, like he was in life. He could live with that, so to speak, as long as he didn't have to bear it.

Before he could back down, he dragged the blade towards his elbow, ploughing through the flesh below. He recoiled immediately, cradling his now soaked arm, the blood pouring freely. He'd have no dignity in death, it seemed, as he screeched his cries into his pillow. At that moment he didn't care about heaven or hell, or anything akin: he'd been told enough no God would take him for his life, and none would accept him for what his death brings. But he hoped there was some end to it all, some nothing filled abyss with no pain or love, what little difference there was between them.

His eyes shut as the pain started to fade, mind filling his soul with images of false smiles and happiness and moments of joy in his life he knew weren't worth their time. Not the time when they happened nor time they took now, but there he saw them, their colours behind his eyelids grow. He wondered, as the images turned to a large garden filled with flowers of yellow, a gray rain bringing out their colour against brick red walls, if he should've gone to the window. If he'd be happier to die watching the sun in the sky - perhaps not. He couldn't see now, the world turning to black. He concentrated on the image, gentle music streaming into the wildflowers, a large warm hand on his. Peace as he watched over his lot.

Safety.

Safety as he left one realm, body entering another drop by drop. In the end, he lay: like the mourning by the grave… or perhaps like narcissus he'd stay, gazing at that which made him smile, bed sheets wrapped around him and blood like petals vile. 

That's how they found him, the hollow god.


	2. Roger

Roger felt the man pull out, weakly realising it was all over now, that there was no more movement and no hand over his mouth. He could scream out loud had he still words, words he used to ignore the man whose tabooed touches had make him panic, eyes to misty to see the blur, blind to the forbidden mechanic.

He took in a breath as the doors shut in, his head still feeling as if it had a cleaver blazing through him; body hitting the floor of the petrol station bathroom now there wasn't a person to pin him against the sink. His head impacting the soiled ground with a hard crack. It didn't matter; his face was already destroyed from the mirror he'd been held against, forced to face the facts. He'd seen eye to eye the various times the hand had gripped his hair and punched him into the glass.

At last?

He didn't want to be found like this, alone like this. Far away from home having skipped uni that day to end it here, living to dress up like what his father called a queer. Now lying on his back with his trousers round his ankles, a stranger's finger prints painted in sangria across his hips, his side scratched red in contrasting angles, blood and spit on his lips.

The strangers come deep inside him.

The thought made him want to throw up again. He could feel the bile trying to rise despite the blood pouring down his throat, he might suffocate first, long before he bleeds out. All that he knew had been torn from his hands, leaving the blond in the knowledge that he was watching the final grain of his hourglass sands.

Someone would find him deceased, call the police, his body getting cut up and investigated: they'd just assume he was asking for it - pleased. He looked like a slut after all, there wasn't evidence to be negotiated. He'd seen the morticians do it in his classes, seen them drain the body, the y shaped cut across the torso, the way someone could go from laughing and dancing to being split and jarred. And then they were no longer somebody.

Would that be him?

Would they investigate more? Would they look into where the accident happen? Open his legs and look into his corpse, contemplate how he deserved it before their lunch break called, then summon his father to identify the body of this dead twenty something year old they'd found fucked to death on a piss splattered floor?

What would his father say? I told you so? I told you, son, I told you to cut your hair short and keep your chest broad - to be a man. To hold yourself like a man, or else have that name ripped away: to be used like a woman…

To be used like his father used his mother, threatened to use his sister. Roger had too much time for gay boys, that what he'd said, to allow it is to be part of it, not a resistor. So by that logic, as the brightness and electrical whirring of the lights above, had he deserved this? Allowed this end by allowing for love?

Roger remembered being a child, the copper smell removing itself from his blood and becoming a hapney coin. Holding onto his mum's hand as he took a year's worth of pocket money out to Manse point. He'd drop the coin into the well and make a wish up on those cliffs, it never occurred to him he'd end up like this.

He let his younger self watch the sea as the world slipped away, eight year old eyes watching his body like a ship cast asunder by the frey; a storm too violent to master now, his life just becoming debris.

His life slipped away as the vessel sink under, the waters too strong and the currents too deep until sleep?

"Roger Taylor, twenty two," the coroner would say, having not seen the well or the wish or the storm, his eyes not watching a carrion float, "Suffocated on his own vomit after an assault."


	3. Brian

There was always going to be a single match that set it all aflame. A single word that marched to the ignition of the fire, kegs of fine injury ready for the pain.

The first keg rolled in one afternoon, when Brian was just eight years old. He'd been set up for the blame, his hand of prickles chained to the balloon. He'd sat out in the courtyard cold, watching as the others for appraisal, his captors sat and grinned childish jokes at he who was left out all alone.

He hugged his sides into him, feeling sick, fingers digging into the flesh, tightening their grip. He felt it through his uniform, the pain he managed to inflict, hands like a vice to find the bone that would not conform. The bone like him: the problem one that would hold his release back into society. But then it snapped, the pain like a band around his chest, like a hand around his airway. But that was good, wasn't it? That was how things were best.

Broken.

The rib never really healed, cleverly concealed with clothes and excuses and anything to avoid having to reveal. He moved on, remembering that breaking was how he fixed himself, the smell of ever growing gunpowder in the air. All mistakes became a reason to repair, to feel pain by taking his nails down his skin and pull his hair, a wealth of instruments for his devices: chisels to pull at chunks of his life, hammers to despise his cries.

Until he found the vice.

His vice, vice he used to shape his guitar, vice his father used to fashion a star; a tin cut out his baby eyes would stare at from his cot and dream about and never marr, the arms he’d never scarred, the tears he’d never barr. The tool he’d used to make his lot, now held his arm in careful slot. He turned the guage, it judging his skills between it’s teeth as it bit down. Soon found the bones in their flesh cage, rattling the screams from him as he continued; only anger and rage. He’d let down the child who’d dreamed in the sky, the boy who’d heard music and dared he could fly.

His arm felt limp to his side, smiling as his future died - he was in charge now, to strings to guide. Just an idea. Clear, in his mind, he could see mankind and it was blind. His eyes like Morpheus sighed, as the few working fingers clawing inside. The stars went black by his own device, his only sacrafice to the baby that would from his rot, be all he could be before he forgot.

The kegs exploded as his eyes fell to the floor, no mind to think of all the gore, nor life to live forever more. The world would say it expected, an exposed experience he’d detected, but alas the reaped had selected; he was done, by death connected to those whose lifes projected would have cradled him, but whose deaths neglected. Their lives as three broken at the seams, an echo of what they wouldn’t have been...

Mr May, alone and unseen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may make this into a podfic if i have time


End file.
